SUMMARY:

This article reexamines the personal and intellectual contacts between P. N. Savitskii and L. N. Gumilev during the 1950s and 1960s in order to assess the validity of Gumilev’s claims to be “the last Eurasianist.” These contacts are placed within the context of Savitskii’s dynamic intellectual biography. It is argued that after World War II, when his contacts with Gumilev took place, Savitskii himself had already abandoned the central ideas of “classical” Eurasianism and, thus, strictly speaking ceased to be a Eurasianist. At least since the late 1930s Savitskii’s “classical” Eurasianist historiosophical and political ideas developed into a new, explicitly anti-Western and pro-Soviet, yet still anticommunist conceptual framework that can be called “trans-Eurasianism.” It was Savitskii’s “trans-Eurasianism” that brought him intellectually close to Gumilev. By adding this transitional stage to Savitskii’s intellectual odyssey we can better explain both continuities and discontinuities between “classical” and neo-Eurasianism.